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32bit adress space

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Weaksauce
Joined
Dec 16, 2005
Messages
80
Have a question that's been nagging at me about 32bit os and large video cards. I have two 4870x2s which total 4gb of video ram. I've heard stories of people claiming that the os allocates gpu ram first, so their system was not able to boot as it had no system ram. Has anybody else tested this out before?
 
Its not just video cards - its the address space other devices need too. My 4gb ram system only shows about 3.25 gb available because i have a 640mb video card.

If you have 4gb of video ram.... You're going to need a 64bit os. (or remove one card)
 
Your system will allocate GPU RAM first and only 4 Gb of RAM can be addressed using a 32 bit address space. I have no idea if it will address all of your GPU RAM and leave none for the system, but some of your RAM will go unused.

With a system running hardware as nice as yours, i see no reason you should run anything but a 64 bit OS unless there is some specific software you need that isn't available in 64 bit.
 
Yeah, I have no actual intentions of running a 32bit os, otherwise I would've just found out the answer for myself. Just curious really, as it is an amusing but serious issue for those that do need a 32bit os, guess they'll have to take a card out.
 
Each card doesn't eat 2GB of your address space. Usually, a gfx card eats (up to) 256MB per GPU plus a small amount. You can check it with msinfo32
 
pallesen said:
Each card doesn't eat 2GB of your address space. Usually, a gfx card eats (up to) 256MB per GPU plus a small amount. You can check it with msinfo32
Click to expand...
Do you know where you can go to find out how much memory is being used up by typing in the memory resource range?
 
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